I'm back from a couple of weeks of traveling. The my first stop was to visit some family in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area. I knew that the founder and community manager of 3PARug.com, a user support community, is in the area too.

My friend and former colleague Marc Farley introduced me to Richard Siemers a few years ago at SNW in Dallas. I also got to spend some time with Richard at HP Discover in Las Vegas earlier this year. Knowing that I would visit my family some time soon, I had the thought of doing a podcast with Richard the next time I found myself in DFW.

3PARug.com is like many other support forums but this one is really a user community. I'm sure there are a few others that join in but I'm always impressed by communities where users share knowledge with each other. In the podcast, Richard and I talk about the 3PAR forum.

If you rather download this as a podcast, right click here and save the MP3 file.

VMworld Barcelona kicks off next week and man, do I regret that I can't be there. I'll miss not being there with the community! And if you aren't able to go too, I have some great news on how you can join HP in our booth from afar.

As with VMworld in San Francisco, HP is a Global Diamond sponsor. We have an in-booth theater and we'll be live streaming the sessions in the booth, #310 if you're attending VMworld. The sessions will run starting Tuesday at 11:30 AM Barcelona time (that's 5:30 AM EDT) for seven and half hours. Will also have streaming video on Wednesday (again starting at 11:30 AM Barcelona time) and Thursday (at 11 AM Barca time). To make it easy for you, I'm going to embed the live stream on my blog so come back on Tuesday and watch the HP Theater sessions here. Go to the full blog post to get the YouTube URL.

The full blog post also has a podcast from a blogger briefing that HP and VMware hosted at VMworld in San Francisco. It's an excellent audio summarizing HP and VMware integration around HP ProLiant, VVols with 3PAR and Converged Systems.

I've had a busy week but want to cap it off by giving you a really good podcast and video that I've done over the last few weeks. And while it's not BURA Sunday, I am on the topic of backup and recovery with the podcast and video. The podcast is with Rick Vanover from Veeam, so go to the full blog post to get that.

While at Nth Symposium, there was a really good keynote from Richard Tengdin from Nth where he gave some great advice about keeping your backup modernized. Nth was kind enough to give me a booth in the expo area and I did an interview with Richard there. Here's the interview.

The BURA team here has been doing a great job with their BURA Sunday blog posts so be sure to check out their blogs. It really is great having a team of people helping with great information on the blog.

Last week I gave the 3PAR team a break from publishing a 3PAR Thursday blog post and I’m doing the same thing again this week, sort of. Earlier this week at VMworld Priyadarshi Prasad (Pd) and Eric Siebert presented a session titled The Perfect Stormage: Virtualizing Tier-1 apps with All-Flash Arrays. I recorded the audio of the session and wanted to share it with you here. I’m also including a PDF of the session’s slides that you can use.

On Monday at VMware, HP had a session diving into VMware vVols. The session was presented by Ivan Iannaccone from our 3PAR product management team as well as Patrick Dirks from VMware who manages the vVols team. This is audio from that session.

I did a blog post with a demo on vVols nearly 2 years ago and while vVols isn't generally available, it is certainly getting closer. What VMware did announce is that vVols would be in vSphere 6.0 but the timing of that has not been publicly disclosed.